Point+of+Tension+Study

When I was in seventh grade I spent three months as a functional illiterate. Three months to discover that ignorance is not bliss. My first years, those in school and those before, were spent carelessly at ease. Reading and writing were nothing I was forced to struggle with. Quite the opposite was true- I loved to read and write. The classroom held it's struggles for me, as it does for everyone, but mine never came with spoken or written words. My teachers all told my parents that I was a natural reader. The world was made up of sounds and symbols that were so natural to my young mind they were virtually invisible. They formed a natural framework for my young existence. Never asserting themselves, those words never calling attention to themselves unless it was to have fun, to entertain, to play. I read constantly and above my level. I joined book clubs. I collected comic books. I wrote my own little stories. And then things changed quickly and drastically. My father was transferred by the corporation that subsidized our lives. It was relocating him, with us in tow, to Singapore. The move itself was nothing new to me. My family and I had packed our belongings into boxes before to take them from one house and school district to another. When I was in first grade that path was short and took us only across the city. When I was in fourth grade the path lengthened and took us across the country. Even that distance hadn't felt all that significant- it seemed to change so little. There were differences of course between California and Connecticut but they felt minor, were more aesthetic and of a surface level. The larger parts of my world remained solid and intact. The transition was fairly seamless. But now this move was to take us to the literal other side of the world. Our boxes would make the trip by boat and we would follow on a twenty four hour flight. A full day to leave behind the familiar. When I told my friends where I was headed each of them took turns to point out the recent headlines in the American papers that had made the island nation of Singapore a household name. A young American living in Singapore had been arrested for vandalism- for smashing mailboxes and spray painting graffiti. He was caned; a harsh and torturous practice of whipping one's backside with a water soaked reed. They also told me that chewing gum was illegal. Already the destination lurked before me as an imposing question mark, threatening me with the unknown. Our arrival was to me at the time cataclysmic. It wasn't the regimented daily lives of the nation's citizens that was startling. It wasn't the rigid laws, it wasn't the tropic weather. It wasn’t the new smells and the strange foods. It wasn’t the motorcycles. It wasn’t the chopsticks or the fish heads. What completely dominated my vision so intrusively that it became difficult to see anything else was the language I had no hope of understanding. The most striking thing wasn’t the overwhelming difference between my culture and this new one, it was the absence of a method for placing it in context. That there was so much happening, so much taking place in so many different and exciting arenas, so much that I was missing out on. I could appreciate only so much. The novelty of it all was one dimensional and superficial- the true depth of my experience was terribly lacking. I can easily recall the walls of indecipherable glyphs that covered every surface. The air itself was thick and hot and everything seemed to move slower or faster, but either way I was moving at the wrong speed. I was always catching up, and working harder to get anywhere than anyone else. A street sign, a menu at a restaurant, a stranger’s comments or questions; anything was as meaningless, as incoherent as Braille to numb fingers. My parents were no help; this new world was as alien to them as it was to me. There were many wrong turns, wrong buses, wrong trains. It was astonishing to see that my parents, these solid figures, these bastions of stability in my young mind, could be so reduced by something so simple as trading one language for another. My mother, who I had followed my entire life without question, was now getting us lost. My father couldn’t always explain things to me. My curiosity went unanswered, leaving mysteries to grow. Something as invisible as I had believed language to be suddenly became concrete. Every turn brought me up against this suddenly visible and tangible barrier. There was to be a period of three months before school began; three months in a confusion of symbols and sounds that flew past me without leaving a mark. The locals would laugh when I groped for the meaning of their questions. They would snicker when they pointed at things and made sounds with their mouths that sounded like babel to me. They could see that I was lost, that they had no way to bring me back in. Confusion became the underlying natural state of my being. The world had become a film without subtitles. Television was a series of strange images with gibberish voice over, events that were happening beyond my understanding. The grocery store, or any store for that matter, was virtually impossible to navigate- not only were they filled with strange things but they were labeled in a strange language that meant nothing to me. I was surrounded by conversations that took place outside of my capability. I would never enter into an exchange with someone that wasn’t based on the simplest gestures or facial expressions- and even that was difficult- the product of a culture I knew so very little about. While I felt around in the dark trying to decipher one moment, things continued and left me behind. Every day, even if I learned something, what I was really learning was how little I knew. I was simply discovering the dimensions of the gap that existed in my mind. Getting anywhere at first was a frightening, disorienting experience. It wasn’t enough that I stood out so drastically physically, that I was taller than most, blonder than anyone- but I might as well have done without a set of ears or a mouth for as much comprehension as they brought me. A sudden life in a foreign country is as close as I can imagine it would be like to be illiterate. It was like never learning to read, to write, to speak. When the only other English speakers in the sea of Mandarin are your family, the day to day can become a larger task than you can ever imagine. Even the simplest tasks take on monstrous proportions, exhausting in the intricacies of carrying out small routines. I’ll be honest- there was no easing into things, and it all kind of scared me at first. There were feelings of being dropped in something, or having something pulled out from beneath. We were not on vacation. We now lived here. This was my everyday, as far from a visit or holiday as one can get. It makes sense that my comfort then was to escape into fiction- back into the known universe of a system I was the product of. I spent my time reading novels and comic books trying to inhabit a world that I could understand. A set of worlds shaped by the landmarks of things and places that fit within my grasp. A boy in seventh grade has enough changes taking place in his life without moving to a foreign country- and all the change outside of me felt like an exaggeration of the changes life was already putting me through. The case of the American boy sentenced to have his back torn apart by lashes grew in some odd way to something I could understand in my mind. It wasn't the vandalism I understood, that wasn't anything I could appreciate. While I didn't, and still don't, know what words he wrote with black spray paint on the walls of an apartment building- there was something about him putting his words on this world that I got. Something about the need to put a label on the world around him with a word that meant something to him. Something about his desire to lay claim to his surroundings by marking it with his own words. I was sure, and still am, that whatever it was he wrote was something obscene and more than likely took a four letter form. And yet- it still became a kind of illegal poetic act. Some inarticulate declaration of the frustration born by the ill fitting confines of a different culture, of a different language. Once school began and I was again surrounded by the language that owned me, I felt I could breathe again. I attended a school for expatriates of other English speaking countries- a school for Americans, British, Australians or children from more scattered upbringings- but with English our lowest common denominator. I was returned to the sounds of my own tongue and it's grasp of familiar words and turns of phrase that meant something to me, something more than pitch and tone. The sounds my mouth produced were taken in. For months my words had fallen flat on the ground and were left to die there like a species of curious fish dragged out of the ocean to suffocate on the land. If everyone’s voice were a loaded gun- mine was a cap gun loaded with blank rubber bullets and as serious as a water pistol filled with incoherent sugar water, that no matter how well aimed always missed its target. Now, there were people that I could share with. I could then appreciate that new world. I felt grounded in a way the previous months hadn’t allowed. Supported then- I was able to feel free to explore this new world. My experiences began to take a new shape. The confusion and exhaustion was replaced by a sense of wonder and amazement. My experiences then became a source of intense exploration and excitement. With friends I could speak about the new things I saw, the new things I tasted and touched. The harsh edges of the world seemed less sharp now that I could describe them and had someone to talk with about them. The sense of relief in those others who were also newly submerged was evident, we unloaded on each other. The words we’d been saving up over the summer before school began came pouring out of us. That short time was enough to impress upon me the power language has over your life. Words can be anchors in the day. Without them, untethered and aimless, the world can be harsh and punishing, an elusive and ever fleeting background from which you detach. And it was a short time- a scarce three months- about ninety days. However, ninety days without a voice, without the ability to turn sound into meaning, has a way of stretching time to unimaginable lengths. At the time, I articulated none of this. I was filled by vague impressions and was generally overwhelmed. It would dawn on me in the years afterward that life is contingent upon our ability to speak, to listen, to read, to write. Without these tools a life is something unwrapped. Without the ability to talk to others you take a step away from the world. Without the ability to share your thoughts and your experiences you move backward into a kind of exile- a tortured state of watching the world happen around you without a way to understand it and without a way to participate. Life becomes a thing made of mercury, a thing inches away from your touch always. The power of language entranced me. My imagination was seeded with the potential of words and their combinations. I would be driven from then on in my education to follow this new obsession. My time in school, and my time outside of it, came to be defined by my relationship with the English language. The sense that to master language was to be part of the world was etched in my mind. To be illiterate is to be isolated, to be a person cut off from their environment, and that was not enough of a life for me. High school was spent reading all that I could get my hands on. College was spent as an English major. And afterward, when life took strange turns away from language to make me for a time a photographer- a life dealing with images left me feeling an absence like a phantom limb. I felt a return to transactions based on a one dimensional currency of gestures and facial expressions. A return to watching the world without taking part in it. It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but if that’s the case I will always take the words. Something was missing that pulled me back toward a spoken and written language. As undeniable as any other bodily function.